Transcript continued from the Episode 051 Show notes

Profitable or Passionate?

That gets us to a piece of feedback from the Facebook fan page from the land of ice shards in Europe. Andrew Hansen in London was telling me the weather forecast actually contained the term “ice shards.” That’s not something he had to deal with too much when he was in Australia, but apparently there are ice shards in the UK. Here’s what Dave Tudor from the UK had to say about something I said earlier in the show….

“Hi from the UK Mark. I listen to your podcast regularly and am one of those ‘on the verge' Internet marketers trying my best to get started.”

I totally identify with that. He goes on to say…

“I get a little confused as to where you stand on the subject of affiliate marketing. On the one hand you actively support guys like Pat Flynn, who advocate finding a niche that you're passionate about and build a business around that. On the other hand you seem to champion Andrew Hansen, who seems far less choosy on the content of his sites with the major driver being to select niches that can make money.

There does seem a bit of a conflict on this. In my mind you can only really recommend one method and not both. I did buy Andrew Hansen's latest course (through your affiliate link, I believe) but his approach is far more ‘mercenary' (if that's the right word for it) than Pat's.

Please clarify which side of the fence you're actually on, Mark, if you'd be so kind. Thanks.”

This is an excellent and insightful question that shows Dave is actually listening to what I’m saying, which is awesome. This is a valid point that Dave is making.

He has a couple of points in here, but one of the main points is, “Are you saying that we should pursue our passion and do something that we really care about, or are you saying that we should chase the money and don’t worry about whether it’s our passion or not?”

Further, he’s saying it’s one or the other and you have to choose, you can’t have it both ways. The other point that he makes is Andrew Hansen is mostly on the side of the fence of choosing niches based on profitability and not paying much attention to what they’re actually all about and what you care about. On the other hand, Pat Flynn is on the side of doing things that you care about and adding value and so forth.

So this is a good question, but I don’t agree with all the premise in it. Let me see if I can clear this up for you, Dave. I love this question and I really appreciate you sending it in.

First of all, to be clear, absolutely the thing that I’m most jealous of when I look at internet businesses and I see someone who is passionate about a topic and they are doing something that they would do for free anyway, and then they’re able to talk about that and help other people do that thing, and that thing makes those other people’s lives better, that is just an awesome thing.

Let’s use Cliff Ravenscraft as an example. The thing that he loves more than anything in the world, I think, besides his family and his spiritual journey is podcasting. This is what this guy is all about. He lives it, he breathes it. The thing that makes him go and fills his gas tank is helping people. Cliff has built a career, a business, on the way to building an empire, podcasting – doing the thing that he really loves vocationally maybe more than anything else – and helping people, which is kind of his core value. He is able to combine those two things and build this business, and it shows. When you do business with Cliff you immediately feel that that’s what he’s all about.

To some extent, although the vocation part is not quite as clear with Pat, you get the exact same thing. You get that he wants to help people, what really gets him excited is turning people’s light bulbs on, and that’s why he does what he does. I think that’s his real motivation. Although, with Pat you can’t quite as clearly point to a topic, a vocation, where he is passionate about a thing that’s aside from what he’s helping people with. With Cliff there’s podcasting. With Pat Flynn it’s a little bit more diffused, there’s not that thing that you could point to. Helping people is the thing that Pat is interested in and it’s a standalone thing.

So there are some examples on the passion side. What I particularly say and what I’ve been saying lately is even though those businesses are the ones that I admire and it’s what I’m trying to build with Late Night Internet Marketing, it’s what I’m trying to do because I’m very interested in internet marketing and how internet marketing actually works and I love helping people, turning their light bulbs on, changing their lives and getting them started on this path. So I fall into that category.

But, I think that it is a huge barrier for someone who is getting started online trying to build a business to come to them and say, “Identify your great passion, the reason you’re on the earth, and blog about it and build a giant business.

Now, you can do that. You can do that successfully. If you have some sense of what that is or if you think that describes you, that you already know that’s what you want to be and you can see yourself in this position, or even if you can’t quite see yourself in that position but that’s what you want to be, then the place to go is Internet Business Mastery. No question about it. You go there and sign up for Internet Business Mastery and you become the world’s leading expert in your topic of choice. There’s absolutely no question that’s what I recommend. If that’s for you, that’s the right thing to do.

I think what the IBM guys have found and what I’ve found is that what’s needed to get there are some baby steps, some sense about how the internet works. My point of view now is that passion is important, but also targeting some achievable short-term objectives is also very important.

I advocate that what you do is go find some things that you are interested in and you focus on building some small affiliate opportunities around those things that you care about. So it doesn’t have to be your life’s calling. It could be something that you know a lot about or care about a great deal is electronics and there’s some particular kind of electronics, like audio equipment or calculators, or something where there’s an affiliate opportunity there and it’s something that you care about and you have something to offer where you can go create some value and make an affiliate sale or two around that product.

The main reason that I advocate this middle position for people who are getting started – this middle position between the mercenary thing that you describe, the Andrew Hansen side of the fence, and the more complete follow your passion “this is why I’m on earth” version – is because I think it’s really a lot to bite off and it takes a long time to go down the passion road. Starting with that objective it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel when you start there, even though people do and it works. For the majority of people it’s a lot to swallow.

On the other hand, just going off and picking something and deciding that you’re going to jump into the Forex market and try to be affiliate in Forex when you don’t care about that, that is similarly hard because when the going gets tough and you’re not really sure, you’re uncertain, or you encounter obstacles, if another one of your obstacles is that you couldn’t care less about the market that you’re working in you will quit, and quit equals fail in internet marketing.

I’ve said this many times. Most people who fail in internet marketing fail because they quit too soon.

So I want you to choose something to do that you can actually achieve. Right now I think that’s small Forever Affiliate style affiliate websites that have a chance of making hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month when properly executed. I want you to do that and I want you to pick things that you’re actually sort of interested in.

I’m a scuba diver. I haven’t looked to see (maybe I should) if there are affiliate opportunities in dive computers that I should be checking out. I haven’t checked that out, but maybe I need to. In any case, that is really what I recommend for that.

The bottom line is try to pick something that you can achieve that will hold your interest. That’s really what I’m saying. That’s the middle ground.

As far as the strict answer to your question, Dave, I think the best most fulfilling businesses that you can have on the internet are businesses where you’ve discovered something that really gets you excited, something that you would do for free even if you couldn’t make money at it, something that you’re that excited about, and that helps other people. I think those are the best businesses.

If you can figure out an internet business that does that, I think you should do that. The place to do that, in my view, is Internet Business Mastery Academy. I would love to see you go there. Jeremy and Jason are friends of mine and they do an excellent job with that.

If you’re just getting started and that doesn’t resonate with you, and you’re looking for something more short-term where you want to see income faster, because in that first case it might be a year or two before you see a substantial income in many cases, if you want to do something more quickly then I think a nice stepping stone is something like Forever Affiliate.

Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

Another thing that I will tell you is that the things that you learn in doing something like Forever Affiliate are directly applicable to the things that you would be doing in something like Internet Business Mastery Academy, so nothing is wasted. And if you successfully execute both you create relatively passive income streams with Forever Affiliate, which can fund the pursuit of your passion that may be a longer term larger investment for you. So I think those things go together fairly well.

I’ll give you another example of how you can reconcile this passion versus niche thing.

One of the things that Pat talked about in the podcast last week was that he didn’t really care about security guard training. That site makes something on the order of $3,000 per month for him and he doesn’t care about security guard training. What does he care about? He cares about helping people. So he has built a security guard training website that helps people become a security guard, which is something that could change their lives, they could feed their family that way, there are lots of ways you could imagine that kind of career advice could help someone.

Let’s say you decide to be an affiliate marketer and market some sort of skincare product or a health product, a vacuum cleaner, or whatever it is. If you really do it well and you research the products yourself and try to figure out what the best ones are and only promote the good ones and provide people information that actually helps them obtain a product that’s going to make their life better, then you can get a small piece of that.

Now, it’s not going to be the same as doing some big life calling. But you can still have that same orientation where you’re really trying to help people.

That’s actually what Andrew teaches in Forever Affiliate, the affiliate reviews and the information that you put on these websites to promote these products should add value. That’s another thing that I’ve always said is that the only way to create a real sustainable business is to actually add value for people.

That’s what I recommend and I hope that clears it up. As usual, the truth is in the middle. I don’t think these things are mutually exclusive. I think you could and maybe should do both. If you have more questions or opinions about this, I’d love to talk about them in the show notes.

One thing we ought to talk about next week and one of the things that has been bugging me a little bit lately is should you promote products as an affiliate marketer that you don’t own or haven’t tried, things you think are crappy or don’t believe in, or things you aren’t willing to tell your mom or pastor about. In general, I think the answer to that is no. I think having those kinds of conflicts inside of you will undermine your business.

That’s something we can save for a future episode, but if you have opinions on all these topics I’d love to hear about them at LateNightIM.com/051.

What is Go2Geo?

That gets us to interview for this week with Matt Richardson.

I like this story for a couple of reasons. Matt Richardson is a guy who saw an opportunity and created a business. This is yet a third kind of model for internet business that we don’t talk a lot about on this show.

You can observe the need for a service, maybe because you’re off in internet marketing doing something else where you can see a need and go build a tool or create a service that other marketers or people in some other niche need, and you can sell that. That’s what Matt Richardson is doing with a new product he has called Go2Geo.

Go2Geo recognizes the fact that many affiliate offers restrict where traffic can come from. For example, for Amazon U.S. if you send France traffic to Amazon U.S. that either doesn’t do you any good because they won’t pay you for the France traffic or doesn’t do you any good because French visitors won’t want to pay shipping from the U.S. or maybe the product they want isn’t shipped internationally. If you’re getting French traffic, what you want to do is have smart software that says, “You’re coming to my website from France. Instead of sending you to the U.S. affiliate link, I’m going to send you to a different merchant that’s local to where you’re originated.”

That service is called Go2Geo. It’s a new service, but it’s an interesting thing to tell you about for two reasons. One, because the show is about affiliate marketing most of the time. Two, I hope it inspires you to think broadly about the kind of businesses that you might be able to create as you go down the path of internet marketing and building your own business one night at a time.

Here’s Matt…..

Interview with Matt Richardson of Go2Geo

Mark: I’m really excited about this. Today I have on the phone Matt Richardson from Go2Geo.com. We’re going to tell you what that’s all about. I caught this press release back in January and I have been wanting to get Matt on the show.

Matt, how are you doing?

Matt: I’m very well. How are you, Mark?

Mark: I am absolutely fantastic. As you know, I have a show about affiliate marketing and you have an online service that affiliate marketers are interested in. So that’s a good deal, right?

Matt: Fantastic. Couldn’t be better.

Mark: It works out from a show perspective. The only problem is you are in the land of queens and castles in England. Where are you exactly?

Matt: I’m in Sheffield, which is in South Yorkshire. That’s what they’d call the north of England. If you think of London and go straight up for about three hours you’ll get to Sheffield. It’s what they call the City of Steel.

Mark: I have a friend that’s from Sheffield. I think he attended the University of Nottingham. Is that close by?

Matt: Exactly, that’s just a little bit south down the M1, about 30 minutes down the road and you’ll get to Nottingham. Not quite Sheffield, though.

Mark: That’s like Nottingham Forest with Robin Hood and Little John?

Matt: Exactly. If you want to see a few guys running around with bows and arrows that’s where you’d go. Having said that, Sheffield happens to be the greenest city in Europe.

Mark: Environmentally green?

Matt: Exactly. There’s more trees per person than any other city in Europe. The best part of Sheffield is built on the Peak District National Park and those trees are listed and they’re going nowhere. It’s a really lovely green city. The west of Sheffield, if anyone wants to come out and head into the Peaks, you can’t do much better than that on a nice sunny day.

Mark: That sounds absolutely fantastic. I would like to come there and lift a pint with you at some point. From what my friend tells me, Sheffield also has some killer pubs. Until we get that done, maybe we ought to turn our attention to affiliate marketing.

Back in January I saw a press release that you guys had started up over at Go2Geo. At first, I have to admit, I didn’t really totally understand the problem that you were trying to solve with Go2Geo. When I went and did a little research I thought this kind of affiliate marketing topic would be perfect for the show. Can we talk about this a little bit and can you help me understand what problem Go2Geo endeavors to solve for affiliate marketers?

Matt: Absolutely. Probably the best way of doing it is just to run you through the problem I had one day.

I was looking at the blog entry of an entrepreneurial blogger, an author who you’d know if I told you his name – I haven’t spoke to him or asked him for his permission to name him so I won’t bother, but it’s a guy you would know. He has an international readership, he has a lot of followers, probably about half a million followers on Twitter. He had done a really great job of enthusiastically getting my interest in this product, it was a book as it turned out. He sold it really hard and it was great, so I clicked the link in full mind to actually go ahead and buy the book.

The problem was he sent me to Amazon.com. I’m in England, so what that means to me is if I want to buy a book from Amazon.com it’s not impossible but I’m going to have to wait up to 32 business days for delivery. That on its own is going to stop me from doing it. On top of that I’m going to have pay in U.S. dollars instead of pounds sterling, so I don’t quite know what I’m paying either and I have to wait for my credit card bill to come in and find out what the exchange was and all that sort of stuff.

Then there’s the issue of returns. What happens if I don’t get it? What happens if I do get it and it’s ripped or damaged and I have to return it? How long is that going to take? Is it going to cost me more money? Then I start thinking if there are any tax implications, if there was some import tax on it. Or let’s say it was an electrical item and there would be a problem with compatibility.

I looked at all this guy’s links and they were all the same, it was simply looking after the home market. But undoubtedly for him he was losing out on a whole load of different people from all around the world, because he was read all around the world.

I thought that was interesting, so I started doing research on other affiliates and the same seemed to be true almost universally. They were simply going for one link to one location for one market, their home market, and that was it.

I thought what we could do was a product where very simply and easily without having to install any scripts or without having to have any technical knowledge you could simply take that link, replace it with another link, and then decide bearing in mind the location of the visitor to send them to different and multiple locations depending on where they were in the world. You could send them to their home storefront so that they could buy using their home currency and they could enjoy next day delivery, so on and so forth.

That’s where the basics of the product came from, that’s where the basic idea came from.

Mark: I see. So this idea of link switching. The obvious example that comes to my mind would be eBay. In general, it makes absolutely no sense for me to send you to an eBay U.S. link because you’re not going to win an auction in the U.S. and most eBay sellers don’t want to ship internationally. What you need to be sent to is eBay UK. But the only way I know that is when I look at your IP address to know where you are in the world.

I take it that your service has the ability to analyze the incoming traffic, the IP address of the person who clicked the link, and then decide where you’re going to send the traffic based on where that person is coming from.

Matt: Because what we wanted to do was leave it as a universal service with complete control, what we’ve had to do is leave it so that the little bit of setting up is left to the user. What we’ve done is we’ve provided analytics, which are actionable.

Everybody has something like Google Analytics on their sites and they know everything from one end to the next of all of the different stats. But many times these are just vanity metrics because people don’t seem to actually utilize that information and do anything about it to enhance their business. With this we’re providing analytics which you can actually act upon.

If you stick a link in and let’s say you’re sending people to the American eBay store. You’d put your default link and that would be great. Then what you’d be able to do is look at your real time statistics and see where you’re getting traffic from. If you saw that you were getting quite a large percentage of your traffic from other countries you could then go about setting up the redirect.

If you take it back to the Amazon example, Amazon has 10 storefronts which have 10 separate affiliate programs. Unless you’re putting the customer through the correct affiliate program you’re not going to make your sale.

If you send me to Amazon.com all I’m going to do is think, “Great, I’ve got my idea now. Thank you very much. I’m going to click into my browser and put in Amazon.co.uk,” and I’m going to go ahead and buy the book, but the affiliate is going to lose his commission.

I wondered how many times a storefront like Amazon were making a sales that had been generated by an affiliate but the affiliate was never getting paid out. I thought this was really interesting, because this will then take that and completely level the playing field. At the same time, because it’s just a link it means that if you can find a brand in a country that Amazon does have a storefront and that’s doing you a better deal on that product, well then don’t link it to Amazon.com, for that product link it to the other storefront. Or if you find that you have a whole load of traffic coming from a location that Amazon doesn’t have a presence in, again you can exploit that.

This one link can be redirecting to all countries of the world, which I understand is over 94 different countries of the world, all from the single link on your page. All you have to do is decide where you want the traffic to go. If you see that 13% of your traffic is coming from the UK you might think that’s probably worth a few quid, well exploit that and in the future send the UK guys and the U.S. guys over there, send the Canadian guys over there, and so on, all from the single link on your page.

Mark: Wow. This totally makes sense to me from the perspective of it’s obvious. I know you’ve only been up and running since January, at least publicly. Have you gotten some initial feedback from users of the system that have talked about whether this theory of higher conversions actually pans out on real traffic?

Matt: It seems to. At the moment we have a small roster of customers. Obviously, from a standing start it’s a steady game. Also, I think I need to expand the offering a little bit in terms of what we’re doing at the moment.

I think what I need do as well is include a free trial period so people can actually understand it without having to risk any money. The easiest way to get somebody to buy your service, I think, is to find out that they’re making back far more than they would pay for it.

Mark: Especially on something like this, if they can use it and they’re already making more than the monthly fee during the trial, then it’s a no-brainer.

Matt: It’s a no-brainer to carry on, exactly. I think, also, what I’d like to do as one of the next steps is we’re going to increase the criteria by which you can redirect. We’re also going to be looking at things like bringing in your own domain as well, so that you can use your own domain on a link. It just makes things a little bit sweeter for the person using it.

It’s certainly moving at quite a pace right from the start.

Mark: One of the things I love about this business is, first of all, it makes obvious sense, it provides a valuable service, you’re clearly adding value. One of the things that I like about it is you were looking around in the marketplace, you saw a need, and you decided to fill that need, in this case with a software service product, and you started your own company.

Can you talk to us a little bit about that process, about what it’s been like to start Go2Geo? And maybe what advice you have for other entrepreneurs that are wanting to do this same sort of thing where you see this obvious gap in the marketplace and you go to fill it?

Matt: Absolutely. The hardest thing was actually to get the site developed. Initially I thought it would be very straightforward to go ahead and outsource this, because I’m not a particularly technical guy. Actually, I’m a musician by trade. I do a few other things too, but the fact is I’m not a technical guy so I needed a development team.

I thought, having read upon it, going out and outsourcing this would be really straightforward. Every time you read these books and articles about outsourcing it just sounds like such a dream. Actually, I found it to be completely the reverse. After a lot of going round, it wasn’t a waste of time but there was certainly a good learning curve.

In actual fact, I’ve actually ended up with a great team that are right on my doorstep. But it has taken a lot longer and I’m much further behind the schedule that I had set for myself and the development that I had set for myself. I’m miles behind just because of the fact that I’m not able to get my hands dirty personally and get in there without the actual development team working on the product. Like I said, there’s a fair bit of work to do, both on the user experience and what we’re offering. So there’s more to come.

This is the only thing that’s slowed me down, so I found it actually quite a slow process. The idea for the business came about two or three years ago, but it’s taken me a heck of a long time just to find the right guys.

That’s one of the things. If you had asked me, especially as a non-techie guy, what my one thing I would recommend, it is that you have to find a really handy team. There’s a lot of guys out there that will tell you they can do something, but it’s not until you’ve got halfway down the road with them that you find out they can’t actually do it and they’ve told you something that actually isn’t right. That’s the one thing.

How you go about that team… who knows. Maybe it’s serendipity or the luck of the draw, I don’t really know. But that’s the one thing I would say is that you have to get a really good team who give you good advice and that can do what they say they can do in a timescale that they say they can do it. That would be my one big bit of advice for this sort of business.

Mark: It’s particularly difficult if you can’t find someone by referral. That’s the thing that works really well, but sometimes on bigger projects it’s hard to find the right match from people you know, especially if you’re not around a lot of people who are hiring programming teams. In the music industry you probably didn’t have a lot of friends like that.

Matt: Exactly. If you want me to put a band together, if you want me to fix a gig or whatever, then I have a database full of people and I know exactly where to go for that. But this is so far out of my original comfort zone that it’s all brand new.

There’s something to be said for that as well. It’s completely new, completely scratch, and you just go after it. It’s all very exciting, it’s all very new, and we’re moving, we’re starting, getting that ball and pushing it down hill. Hopefully we’re going to get it rolling really fast going forward.

Mark: I think you’ll find in a year or two, or maybe you’ve already found, that not being the guy who is focused on line 437 of some PHP script somewhere means that you can really focus on the growth of the business and you’re not all down in these technical details.

In the end, a lot of this is going to be marketing and reaching the right people. The technical solution will be largely done. Sure, you’ll add features probably for the lifetime of this project, but the base product will be done and what will be left will be running the business, marketing it, finding customers, and that sort of thing. Not being the technical guy will help you focus on that.

Matt: Exactly. That’s really my end to my job now, is to just keep pushing and, like you said, find the right people, keep talking about the product, get more and more people.

The other thing is a lot of the time I don’t even know whether this problem even comes to people’s minds or not. I don’t know if people even think about it. You have people who have loads of international traffic which they could capitalize on, but they aren’t doing it. We’re not talking just one geezer with a few products here and there. We’re talking about people who have a whole raft of evergreen links out there and they’re not doing what they should be doing, they’re not making what they should be making each year. They’re effectively just losing money.

Really the proposition is, “Do you want to make more money or not?” You’re doing the work, you’re writing the articles, you’re hosting your sites, you’re throwing out the links. Do you want to make more money on those links or not? That’s really the question.

If the answer is yes, then that’s where Go2Geo really comes in because it’s really cost effective. Like you said, you’re almost always going to make more than $9.99 back, depending on what you’ve got going on. That makes it a no-brainer, really.

Mark: It really does. I do a lot of affiliate marketing and a lot of affiliate offers will only accept traffic from certain countries. If you want to access traffic from other countries you have to send people to an entirely different offer. Coding that up on your own blog is not straightforward, so it’s a really neat idea to be able to have a service to do that with, especially one that is as affordable as what you’re talking about. That’s really cool.

Matt: Of course, you end up getting a link that gets load of traffic then we’re handling it. You’re not handling it, we’re handling it. That makes it a really good cost effective way to do it.

Mark: Related to this, I have a lot of listeners that are involved with iTunes, either as customers of iTunes or they write apps for the iTunes store or they’re promoting iTunes as an affiliate. Can you talk about the special case of iTunes for affiliate marketers, sort of as our last example of how Go2Geo can help people?

Matt: The issue with iTunes is that they have 45 country specific affiliate programs worldwide. They’re administered by just four affiliate networks – Linkshare, Tradedoubler, DGM, and the Linkshare Japan.

Tradedoubler is slightly different in that they have a situation where they have the European and Latin American countries and then Brazil is on its own, so they’re slightly different. But for DGM they’re dealing with the programs in Australia and New Zealand. Linkshare is dealing with the programs in the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

The same problem exists that you have to be geo-targeting properly, otherwise you simply lose out. What better than to stick that link in there, make sure you’re targeting your customers correctly, make sure you send them to the right places via the right affiliate programs, and mopping up all those extra sales?

Amazon, iTunes, eBay, all of these different stores are all basically crying out for the same solution, I think.

Mark: I guess in the case of iTunes I can understand why they don’t handle this on their end, because it’s actually different affiliate networks. There’s no way for Apple, the way that they’re set up now, to even solve this problem on their end.

But why doesn’t eBay just go ahead and route that traffic? Do you have any sense of why? I guess maybe the answer is that they don’t have a very strong incentive to make sure I get paid. Do they?

Matt: That’s exactly right. If you think about it, if you’re flogging something and making a sale, like on Amazon, and some other guy says, “I’m not buying from that storefront, now I know what it is I’m just going to go to this other storefront and buy it.” Well, the affiliate has done his job, he’s spent all his time, energy, and money doing his job. But these guys haven’t paid out.

I wonder how much money they’re not paying out each year that they would otherwise have to pay out. That is an interesting question and that’s why that solution works. Like you said, they have no incentive to change anything, especially when they’re getting you to do all that hard work but you aren’t getting paid for it.

Mark: I love this, Matt. The thing I love about your story the most is this instant success. To many people they will look at your story and say, “Hey, this guy had an idea, he started a business in January, and he’s off to the races. Here it is in March and he’s running this business.” The truth of the matter is behind every instant success story there’s years of struggle. I love the fact that what’s really behind this is a great idea and then a lot of hard work to make it happen.

Congratulations on getting your business up and running.

Thank you for alerting us to this. I’ll tell you, I have links to iTunes, affiliate links on my blog, I have links to Amazon, I have links into all kinds of places, and none of that stuff is geo-targeted at all. So this is helpful to me and I think it will be helpful to my listeners. I appreciate you being here to talk about this.

I do have one last question. Tell us a little bit about your music career. I’m very interested in that. Do you play an instrument? What kind of music does your band play? Are you still doing that or did you have to drop that for this Go2Geo thing?

Matt: Well, I was a scholarship student at The Royal Academy of Music in London. It’s one of the best schools in the country, one of the best in the world. I was on the classical course, so I play drum kits, I play percussion, some orchestral percussion as well. I work freelance, so I work as a session player playing anything from a jazz gig, a pop gig, a show, or a classical gig, opera, whatever.

I also run a whole host of different bands and I fix a whole host of different things for corporate events, bar mitzvahs, weddings, military engagements, all that sort of thing. So I have a whole host of bands. I have a great band called VIP, I have another band called the MPR Jazz Ensemble. We work all over the United Kingdom, as well as a little bit in Europe.

That’s something that has taken a slight back burner for me just at the moment, but it’s something I continue to do. I also do a tiny little bit of teaching, which amounts to about 30 days per year so it doesn’t take up too much of my time. I like to keep my hand in with that as well, just a bit of education work. It makes me nice and well rounded.

With music you have to keep it up. You can’t let it go because it’s part of what you do, part of who you are. Any opportunity I can see, I’ll take it. But my base is music because that’s who I am and what I am. So I’ll keep working and I don’t think I’ll ever stop, to be honest.

Mark: Percussionists always amaze me. I knew I could never be one because I can’t play triplets with one hand and eighth notes with the other, so I knew I was doomed.

Matt: Absolutely. The whole thing of independence of limbs. I remember having lessons with Jim Chapin from America, he’s passed away now but he taught all the guys. His hands, right to the end, were absolutely ferocious. He used to get on the practice pad and he could burn me off no problem at all. This guy was just mega.

Independence. It’s one thing to practice on the kit. Get the Jim Chapin book and get your independence together and you’ll never look back.

Mark: Independence is good for marketers too. You need to be able to outsource with one hand and market with the other. That’s great, Matt. I appreciate it.

If people want to hear more about Go2Geo or follow your story, where’s the best place to hook up with you online?

Matt: Get to the site at www.Go2Geo.com. You can send me an email there via the site, or you can send me a direct email at [email protected]. Anything you need to know, any questions, anything like that.

Like I said, keep your eye on the site, because it’s going to be changing very shortly. The site that we’ve launched needs a fair bit of giggery pokery and it needs a little bit more addition as well. It’s all on its way.

Mark: Excellent. Congratulations. I’d like to hear back from you in a year or so and hear how things are going.

Matt: That would be fantastic, Mark. Absolutely.

Mark: Awesome. Matt, thank you very much. You have a great day. We’ll talk soon.

Matt: Superb. Thanks a lot, Mark.

Mark: Thanks. Bye.

Wrapping Things Up

That was awesome. I really appreciate having Matt on the show. That’s Go2Geo.com if you have a need for this sort of service. He’s just getting started out. Tell him you heard about him on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. He’d love to see you over there.

He has a pretty cool blog going over there, too, where he’s starting to talk about some affiliate marketing topics related to this. You might want to check it out and leave a comment. Very cool.

That about wraps it up for this week. I’m headed down to Austin today to check out the end of SXSW with my daughters and to hang out with my brother in Austin. He’s an intellectual property attorney, I’m hoping to get him on the show in a few weeks to talk a little bit about legal issues around internet marketing.

Until then, I hope you have an absolutely stellar, killer, fantastic, off the hook week. Just go crush it this week. Whatever it is that’s been bugging you, that’s been keeping you from getting stuff done on your internet business last week and the week before that, whatever obstacles have been in front of you, whatever excuses you’ve been making, whatever TV shows you’ve been watching, I want you to put all that stuff on hold until you hear the sound of my voice again and go get something killer done this week.

Thank you for listening to the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast…

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